Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Toastworthy Teens - Mackenzie Bearup

Mackenzie Bearup, Sheltering Books

16-year-old Mackenzie Bearup is one of hundreds of thousands
of people diagnosed with Reflex Sympathetic Distrophy (RSD), a disease in which
the brain continues to receive distress messages from nerves and blood vessels
around an injury that has actually already healed. Suffering from RSD doesn’t
just mean sore muscles or achy bones; in Mackenzie’s own words, her pain will “explode
at random times [and] when something touches it, it's like I'm getting stabbed
multiple times.”

Not only is there no cure for RSD, even Mackenzie’s
pain-management doctor cannot prevent the flare-ups that keep the teenager
bedridden for sometimes months at a time.

So this amazing Georgia teen had to find her own way to
escape the pain: reading. But that’s only the beginning of her story; when
Mackenzie learned a nearby residential center for severely abused children had
just built a library but didn’t have books to fill it, she wanted to relieve
some of the pain felt by those kids, too. She set a goal to collect 300 books,
but her flyers, newspaper ads, and website brought in over 3,000!

Still, she didn’t stop there; Sheltering Books, the non-profit
group Mackenzie founded to expand her work, has now donated almost 40,000 books
to 27 different shelters in 6 states.